Using Summon to Locate Short Stories

Summon can help you locate short stories in e-book form at the RIT Library. An example search in the Summon search box might be: "short stories". This search will generate close to two million results. It is very important, then, to use the filters on the left of your screen to refine the results. Under "Refine your Search", select the first box, "Items with full text online". Under "Content Type", choose "Book/EBook". This will now narrow your list to only ebook results. Under the "Subject Terms" category, you can select your subject areas to focus the results. Choosing both "literature" and "short stories" further refines the results to approximately 900 results. Next, limit the publication date ranges. Enter 2003 and 2013 in the far right boxes under "Publication Date" and then click "Update". The majority of your results should be actual short stories although a couple of titles may appear in your list that do not meet your criteria. The reasons for this might be that the book was published in the appropriate time period but it includes stories that were originally written longer ago and there may also be a couple of books that appear that are about short stories rather than actual short stories. So, your results may not be absolutely perfect, but the search should be helpful.

What Makes a Good Short Story?

Search Summon

What does MORE do for me?

Check to see if we have the full text of your item whenever you see the MORE button! If a copy is not automatically found, an option to submit an order for the full text will appear! Click the button now to see what happens!

Can't find the full text?

Discovered a book, article or other item the library does not own? We may be able to get a copy via IDS Express (sometimes called inter-library loan).

Finding Short Stores in the Research Databases

Many popular magazines contain short stories. The RIT Library subscribes to academic and scholarly periodicals and also subscribes to popular magazines. If you use the Search Journals@RIT link, you can search for publications by title and then link directly to the database that contains the publication. From there, you can browse by issue or search across the entire publication. If you click on the "advanced" search, you will see the publication title is already filled in for the publication field. You can then enter "short story" in the second search box and change the field via the dropdown menu to "subject heading". This will give you a listing of short stories within the publication. You will also notice a list of suggested subjects at the top of the screen. These will include short stories and specific time periods or types of literature and/or authors. Note: When searching for magazine titles such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, etc., you will notice that the Library often has access via several different databases. It is often most "user friendly" to use either the Ebsco or ProQuest databases for the above subject searches to access the lists of short stories.

If the short story is not available in full-text from the database, remember the RIT Library can get it for you via IDS (Information Document Service).